Adobe MAX Midway Point

I haven't been to a proper conference, workwise, in something near a decade - so being at MAX is a bit of a trip. Adobe just acquired Buzzword, a most interesting online word processor. They also announced more online services like Share, which seems like it would be a cool way to distribute documents online, but the beta doesn't seem to be giving me any love right now.

Most fascinating, however, is Thermo - announced today with no release date, sadly. Thermo allows you to take Photoshop files (properly layered) and convert them into Flex apps by redefining the layers as components. It's seriously one of those apps that once you see it, you wonder if it won't change your workflow in a positive way of the like you'd never want to leave again.

We've had a chance to show our Accelerate4Pharma application, which runs on Adobe's AIR, during a couple of sessions. I got a chance to talk briefly with James Ward and confess that once I was something of a Flash hater, but now am pretty much entranced by Flex.

I'm cobbling together an AIR app which, should I actually finish it, might help find other AIR applications and organize them via RSS feeds. I'm still at this point where any excuse to code something is a good excuse and it will force me to try something new (like using RSS feeds as a datasource or cleaning up SQL handling for offline data).

Right now I'm huddled in a hallway stealing some electricity, though. The actual accomodations here at McCormick can be a mixed bag. Nice rooms, no outlets. In fact the general design theme seems to be to keep chairs away from outlets at all costs. We found a bench next to an outlet, but the outlet was dead.

To boot, wifi and cell access are dodgy at best. Someone is still looking for the DHCP server, I think.